Category Archives: Political Polarization

Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) and Polarization in the US Senate

In a recent article on gridlock in the US Senate, Senate historian Don Ritchie remarked that: “Part of the shift in the Republican Party means that old-time senators like [Senator Robert] Dole who were to the right of their party … Continue reading

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An Update on the Presidential Square Wave

Below we plot the first dimension DW-NOMINATE Common Space scores of the presidents in the post-war period, which we refer to as the “presidential square wave” due to its shape. DW-NOMINATE is a statistical procedure that estimates the ideological positions … Continue reading

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An Update on Political Polarization through the 112th Congress

The 112th Congress closed unceremoniously this month with a series of votes (by the House and Senate) to avert the “fiscal cliff”. With this data, we can now analyze roll call voting in the 112th Congress in its entirety and … Continue reading

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The Fiscal Cliff: The Congressional Votes that Got Us Here

The United States will go over the “fiscal cliff” on January 1st if Congress and President Obama are unable to reach a deal to prevent automatic tax increases and cuts to defense and domestic spending. The economic consequences of going … Continue reading

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The 113th House

In this post we continue our efforts to project partisan polarization in the next, 113th Congress. We previously did so for the 113th Senate; in this post we do so for the 113th House. To allow for cross-comparability with the … Continue reading

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The 113th Senate

With all of the 2012 Senate races called, we can now offer a more concrete assessment of the ideological distribution of the 113th Senate, which will convene in January 2013. We previously endeavored to forecast polarization in the 113th Senate … Continue reading

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Polarization and the 2012 Election

Will centrists be the big winners of Tuesday’s elections? Some commentators suggest so, predicting that the results will compel both parties – particularly the Republicans – to move towards the center. This view contends that a Romney loss, which would … Continue reading

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Congressional Roll Call Margins and Polarization

Originally posted in March, 2011. We had a disk crash last winter and we are attempting to reconstruct lost posts from 2011. We have been asked over the years whether or not DW-NOMINATE is affected by the composition of the … Continue reading

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Forecasting Polarization in the 113th Senate

As can be seen in the plot below, polarization has markedly increased in both chambers of Congress, but the Senate has remained less divided than the House. This does not mean that the Senate has been a more productive chamber … Continue reading

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Paul Ryan: Ideological Location and House and Senate Votes on the Ryan Budget

Below we plot the distribution of DW-NOMINATE (ideological) scores of members of the 112th Congress by chamber and party. We also single out presumptive Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and several figures of interest for comparison. We see … Continue reading

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